Music

Dec 01, 2016, 09:35AM

Right Down Through the Scalp

The default mode of “the snows have a home” is a faintly slaloming buzz that isn’t quite smooth; there’s a hitch to its gait, as though it’s perpetually at risk of stumbling over itself. Electric hair clippers sound something like this, albeit louder and more instinctually threatening in nature. “home” feels oddly remote, like if you’d been growing the mane out for years, it finally get old, and you’d ordered a flummoxed barber to “just gimmie ‘the Eleven’”—but your conscious mind, meanwhile, was experiencing the trim from the underside of some dry-docked, glass-bottomed boat. Just out of reach, if not quite out of mind.

Tickling music—or back-scratching music, if you’d prefer—can send the mind wandering into unexpected areas. As a song, “Home” seems to be happening to a stranger who resembles you, and it’s worth asking yourself sometimes whether you’re living actual life or sleepwalking through it. It’s worth wondering why you want to tune out, or zone out, or lower the volume until it isn’t even clear that you’re even hearing any sound, let alone listening to it. Maybe there isn’t an explanation. We remain, almost helplessly, perfect strangers to ourselves.